The Sveriges Riksbank has issued new regulations (RBFS 2025:1) mandating comprehensive payment statistics reporting for all payment service providers and payment system operators based in Sweden. The general requirements take effect on October 1, 2026, with credit transfer reporting following from October 1, 2027.
This is the first time Sweden has imposed standardised payment data reporting obligations comparable to those the ECB already requires of eurozone PSPs. For a non-euro Nordic economy that has historically relied on industry self-reporting and voluntary data sharing, the shift toward mandatory granular reporting represents a significant regulatory escalation.
Who Is Affected
The regulations apply to: All payment service providers (PSPs) based in Sweden All payment system operators (PSOs) based in Sweden Foreign providers operating through Swedish branches
Firms that only provide account information services are excluded. In practice, this means every bank, e-money institution, payment institution, and payment facilitator operating in Sweden will need to comply.
What Must Be Reported
PSPs must report across 17 categories of payment data, covering the full spectrum of electronic payment activity:
Weekly reporting: Card-based payment transactions, ATM withdrawals, cash advances, and ATM deposits. These high-frequency categories require individual transaction-level detail for items 1-6 in the regulation's taxonomy.
Monthly reporting: Direct debits, money remittances, e-money transactions, payment initiation services, and over-the-counter deposits and withdrawals. Aggregated data is acceptable for these categories.
Semi-annual reporting: Card stock data, payment account counts, POS terminal counts, e-money terminal counts, and ATM inventories.
Payment system operators face a simpler quarterly reporting regime covering 11 categories: participant data, card transactions processed, credit transfers, direct debits, e-money operations, and cash handling volumes.
Why Sweden Is Doing This Now
Sweden's payment market has undergone rapid structural change. Cash usage has fallen to approximately 6% of point-of-sale transactions. Mobile payments via Swish have become ubiquitous. International card schemes have gained share against domestic debit infrastructure. And the Bankgirot clearing platform is being phased out, with batch clearing migrating to new infrastructure.
Yet the Riksbank has lacked the granular, standardised data needed to monitor these shifts in real time. The existing data collection relied on voluntary industry submissions and survey-based approaches that produced inconsistent results across institutions.
RBFS 2025:1 aligns Sweden with the ECB's payment statistics framework, which eurozone countries have operated under for years. This alignment is significant because it enables cross-border comparison of payment market data across Nordic and European jurisdictions - critical context as the Nordics increasingly integrate with euro-denominated payment infrastructure through TIPS and SEPA.
Implementation Timeline
| Milestone | Date |
|---|---|
| RBFS 2025:1 published | 2025 |
| General reporting requirements take effect | October 1, 2026 |
| Credit transfer reporting requirements take effect | October 1, 2027 |
The staggered timeline gives PSPs approximately 18 months from regulation publication to first submission for general categories, and 30 months for credit transfer data. The credit transfer delay likely reflects the ongoing Bankgirot transition and the need for new clearing arrangements to stabilise before reporting begins.
Compliance Burden
The regulation does not prescribe penalties for non-compliance in its current form, but the Riksbank's supervisory powers under the Sveriges Riksbank Act provide enforcement mechanisms. The practical challenge for many PSPs will be data infrastructure: extracting weekly transaction-level data across multiple payment types requires automated reporting pipelines that smaller institutions may not currently operate.
Industry participants should begin by mapping their existing data collection against the 17 PSP categories and 11 PSO categories to identify gaps. The weekly card transaction reporting, in particular, will require near-real-time data extraction capabilities that many legacy core banking systems do not natively support.
Broader Nordic Context
Sweden joins a trend of Nordic central banks strengthening payment market oversight. Norway's Norges Bank publishes detailed annual financial infrastructure reports with extensive payment statistics. Denmark's Nationalbanken has long collected payment data as part of its oversight responsibilities. Finland, as a eurozone member, already reports under the ECB framework.
The convergence of Nordic payment data standards facilitates the kind of cross-border market analysis that regulators increasingly need as Nordic payment infrastructure consolidates around pan-European platforms.
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